20 2000s Movies That Could Never Be Made Today

19. Crash (2004)

LA crime drama Crash has long been the butt of many jokes amongst the film community – and one only needs to watch it to see why.

The picture features a massive cast of Names, including Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, and Brendan Fraser, portraying a swell of characters whose lives and circumstances intersect in unexpected ways. The inciting incident of the film is the titular crash, in which several of the film’s characters exchange cliched racist insults, and this effectively becomes the template for the whole thing, with each narrative strand portraying ham-fisted race relations and equally clumsy resolutions.

At the time, this seemed groundbreaking to white, middle-class audiences, and Crash won a plethora of awards, including the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. But such contrite tripe wouldn’t get past any of the far more diverse awards juries these days. Ultimately, the movie is weak sauce and offers a shallow idea of different racial groups’ situations and their underlying pressure points (poverty, patriarchy, institutional inequality). This wouldn't even get picked up for production today, never mind scoring accolades.